PHP Ucwords with or and special characters

Question

Here is what I'm doing.

I have a couple of strings that is uppercase

†HELLO THERE
DAY OR NIGHT

So to convert them, I'm using the following code:

ucwords(strtolower($string));

Here is the end result:

†hello There
Day Or Night

How can I ignore the † or any special characters so it the words can show

†Hello There

and how can I keep words like or all lowercase.

Answer 1

Try:

print preg_replace_callback('#([a-zA-ZÄÜÖäüö0-9]+)#',function($a){
   return ucfirst(strtolower($a[0]));
 },
 '†hello THERE'
);

[a-zA-ZÄÜÖäüö0-9]+ find a word that only has this chars

You can also use this instead [\w]+ see: http://www.regular-expressions.info/wordboundaries.html

preg_replace_callback call a function on the found result

function($a){} do something with the result, here ucfirst(strtolower())